Windows RAID vs BIOS/Firmware RAID

[AdamK47]

Is there much of a performance difference between the two? I know with BIOS/firmware you can RAID an OS drive, but with Windows RAID you cannot. That seems to be the big difference.

 

[groberts101]

huge difference. Windows soft raid will effectively just give you a larger volume with very little benefit of onboard R0 speed increases. I've tried it everywhich way through the years and it always sucks badly.

Bout the only thing I could say is that Windows employs much more agressive write caching to ram for an array and the artificial small file performance can improve slightly.

 

[AdamK47]

You sure about that? Windows Dynamic RAID and BIOS/Firmware (ie. ICH10R) are both software. I recently had some time to test out Windows RAID-0 with two 3TB Hitachi 7200 RPM drives. I'm getting over 300MB/sec in read and write using ATTO. I also just found this thread. http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=313610

 

[frostedflakes]

One thing I noticed about Windows RAID 1 was that it took forever to resynchronize the array and it would trash the disks during the hours or whatever ridiculous amount of time it took to do this, which resulted in very poor performance when accessing files on the array.

Fortunately this isn't a normal occurrence, only seems to happen after unexpected shutdowns and stuff like that. Drove me freaking crazy a while back when I was having stability issues (due to video card drivers it turns out) that resulted in BSODs every couple days. The onboard mobo RAID 1 never had to resync like that, or if it did it was able to do it in the background without me even noticing it.

But other than that issue, software mirroring in Windows 7 seems to work pretty well for me.

 

[Voo]

One thing to notice is that cheap HW cards aren't good for a lot of IOPS because of their limited CPU power, while that problem is negligible with todays desktop CPUs. So it also depends on what you want to raid together..

 

[aigomorla]

huge difference. Windows soft raid will effectively just give you a larger volume with very little benefit of onboard R0 speed increases. I've tried it everywhich way through the years and it always sucks badly.
.

ICH10R:

2 SSD's in Raid 0

3 SSD's in Raid 0

So im not supposed to see these numbers your saying?

 

[AdamK47]

I'm now fully operational with the two 7200RPM 3TB Hitachi drives in RAID-0 (6TB total) using Windows Stripped Dynamic Disk. This is used for my gaming storage (my OS drive is a 120GB Vertex 3). I would be using RAID-0 through the ICH10R controller on my motherboard, but this controller does not recognize 3TB drives while in RAID mode. Also, only the newest Intel RST drivers properly recognize the drives while in AHCI mode. Performance so far is great. Like I said earlier, I get 300+ MB/sec write and 300+ MB/sec read results from ATTO, which is awesome from two spindle drives.